Targeting the right audience: How do I do it?

When working with innovation leaders in the science, technology, and engineering sectors, understanding and targeting the right audience is paramount. One of the questions I regularly ask is, “Who benefits from your innovation?” Often the response is “everyone”. The main difficulty with this response is that it’s simply not true. Not everyone would be interested in your innovation, and even if it were true and you had the budget to market to everyone in the world, the message couldn’t be the same across the board.

When planning a marketing campaign one size doesn’t fit all – the message you have for your clients will be very different to that for potential investors, partners or even high-calibre staff. Therefore, when starting on your marketing journey knowing your target market is central to smart marketing.

The benefits of targeting the right audience

Being clear about identifying your target audience, not just for your business as a whole, but for every individual project and campaign may seem time-consuming but it will save you time and more importantly money in the long run. If you target marketing at the wrong people it will not bear fruit.

It’s as simple as that.  

By knowing who your latest product or service is best suited for before you start the campaign, ensures that the wording, the message, the imaging and the price are all perfectly aligned with the audience. This will lead to more conversions and ultimately more new clients.

Targeting the right audience

Strategies for targeting the right audience

1. Know your market – Who needs your product? Where can you find them?
2. Know what problem your product/service solves – Identifying why someone needs your product or service will help identify the problems that it solves.
3. Know your existing customers – The easiest market research is with the customers already buying from you. Who are they? What are their pain points? What do they like about your product or service? Why do they keep coming back?
4. Claim your niche – It may seem a great idea to aim at ‘everyone’ but that is a lot of wasted energy, time and money as different interest groups (investors, staff, customers) will all be interested in a different message. So be selective as it’s better to target one perfect potential client well, than waste time targeting 1000 inappropriate ones.
5. Choose the most appropriate channels – There are so many ways to conduct marketing campaigns, but you need to target the channels where your ideal clients are. For example, if you’re targeting online-only businesses, an ad in the newspaper probably won’t yield much ROI. 

Marketing is not an exact science, rather like R & D activities you need to test, record and continually improve. But in marketing, getting the target audience right is the foundation for effective and successful marketing campaigns.

If you would like to discuss your marketing campaigns and getting your target market right, contact Priddey Marketing today.